Performance of hot plate for measuring solid precipitation in complex terrain during the 2010 Vancouver winter Olympics

This false precipitation varied from −0.9 to 1.3 mm h-1 with two peaks at 0.1 and 0.3 mm h⁻¹ depending on wind speed—the larger peak being at higher wind speeds. Since the observed wind speeds were relatively calm, setting the correction factor to 0.15 mm h⁻¹ gave reasonable values as compared to the Pluvio data. The difference between the corrected HP and Pluvio accumulation data varied from 16% to 3% depending on wind speed.

The observed snow density in January 2010 varied from 0.04 to 0.32 g cm⁻³ with a mean value of 0.08 g cm⁻³. The snow amount measured using the corrected HP data agreed well with the manually measured values with a correlation coefficient of 0.93.